The Firebird

‘And adventure.’

‘Aye.’ He nodded. ‘True enough. But what you bring back with you in the end,’ he said, ‘might not be what you started out in search of to begin with.’

I was thinking of that while we made our approach to Dundee on the long bridge that crossed the broad firth where the River Tay swept out to meet the wide sparkling sea.

Rob asked, ‘What’s the time?’

I’d forgotten I still had his watch. Feeling for it in my pocket now, I drew it out. ‘It’s nearly half past ten.’

Why did you keep this? I wanted to ask him, but Rob only held out his hand for the timepiece and strapped it back onto his wrist with the ease of long practice, and asked, ‘D’ye ken where she lives?’

All I knew was the address. We had to stop twice to ask people to give us directions.

Dundee was a lovely town, built up the south-facing side of a hill so it always looked straight at the sunshine, its stone-built historic appeal charged with bright modern energy. But Margaret Ross’s street didn’t have any of that. Her mid-terraced house sat third up in a drab row of others that looked just the same, with their square staring windows and low-walled front gardens and plain iron gates.

I could hear the high whine of a hoover behind the front door as I rang the bell. At the second ring the hoover stopped and I heard footsteps coming slowly, almost cautiously, as though she wasn’t used to having visitors.

She recognised me easily, but clearly hadn’t caught my name so I supplied it once again. ‘It’s Nicola,’ I told her. ‘Nicola Marter.’

‘From London.’ She sounded perplexed.

‘Yes.’ I held up her scarf, neatly folded. ‘You left this,’ I said, ‘in the office. I thought you’d be missing it.’

That only made her look more baffled. ‘Ye’ve never come all this way up to Dundee to return it?’

Rob, who’d stayed two paces back, stepped smoothly in to rescue me with, ‘She was coming to Scotland already, ye ken, and since she didnae wish to trust it to the post we thought we’d stop by and deliver it on our way north the day.’

I guessed he’d slipped back into broadened Scots to put her at her ease, and it appeared to work. I introduced them, and she pulled the door more fully open, standing back and saying, ‘Do come in.’

Rob followed me. He wasn’t hugely tall, but in the small space of the entry hall I felt his presence keenly and it came as a relief to move away, into the tidy front room with its drab green wallpaper and cold and empty fireplace. This was not the room I’d seen the afternoon I’d held the scarf, but still it had that same dejected feeling, like a girl at a dance with her back to the wall watching everyone else whirling by.

Margaret offered me a stiffly upright chair beside the window as she asked Rob, ‘D’ye work in art as well?’

He told her, ‘Aye, from time to time. I started off with archaeologists, identifying artefacts.’

I glanced at him, but couldn’t see the slightest trace of anything to tell me he was lying. Taking up the reins, I said to Margaret, ‘Maybe Rob could help you learn a little more about your firebird carving, now I think of it. He’s really very knowledgeable.’ Turning to face Rob as though the thought had just occurred to me, I told him, ‘Miss Ross has this wooden carving, Rob, that’s come down through her family, and she needs to prove its provenance.’

Rob said he would be pleased to have a look, but Margaret shook her head.

‘It’s kind of ye, but there’s no need. My neighbour, Archie, fetched me from the station when I came back up from seeing you, Miss Marter, and he said …’ She looked embarrassed. ‘Well, he said I shouldn’t take one person’s word for it. That maybe Mr St-Croix was mistaken. Archie kens a man in Inverness who used to live in Russia, and he said he’d take the Firebird up to him, if I was willing. Archie’s daughter lives in Inverness – he’d planned to go and stay with her already for a visit,’ she explained. ‘He left this morning.’

I was trying to digest this. ‘And he took the carving with him?’

‘Aye. He’ll have it home in three weeks’ time,’ she said to Rob, ‘so if you’re up this way again I’ll gladly let ye see it then.’

‘I’d like that very much,’ Rob said.

She made us tea, insisted on it, serving it with scones so light and fresh they barely bore the butter’s weight. I pushed my disappointment down, and mindful of the loneliness I’d felt when I had held her scarf, I tried my best to make the visit stretch a little, making conversation where I could.

Rob helped. ‘Ye have a taste for crime,’ he remarked, with a nod at the barrister’s bookcase beside his own chair, every shelf crammed with hardbacks whose colourful jacket designs were pure vintage.

She smiled and said, ‘Those were my father’s, aye. Loved a good murder, he did. And his spies. He was mad for James Bond.’

‘So I see.’

While Rob studied the titles I nodded in my turn towards a framed sketch on the opposite wall. ‘That’s a beautiful picture. Are those ruins local?’

‘Och, no, that’s New Slains Castle, up to the north,’ she said, ‘near Cruden Bay, where my mother was born. Her family goes a long way back there, all the way to the Anna who first brought the Firebird over here, ye ken, from Russia.’

Standing, Rob crossed over for a close look at the sketch, head tilted. ‘Cruden Bay? Where’s that, exactly?’